


Harbor

by yuutsuhime



Series: 東港 | Higashiminato [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Parents, Biracial Character, Character Study, Divorce, Gen, High School, Japanese-American Character, Loneliness, Rural Japan, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:04:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: A 15-year old girl navigates the emotional fallout of her parents' divorce, finding solace in her rural Japanese hometown as her father moves to the United States.





	Harbor

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this as a legacy work, three years after originally writing it.
> 
> Jaya is 15.

I was waiting for Mom down at the train station; she was late again as always, and the sky was getting dark. The air was more muted than during the day, and I could detect the faint smells of fish and broths wafting from the market by the harbor. The last customers were leaving and the clamor of the kitchens had settled down, so the chefs could finally mop their brows and slump down in their favorite old bar stools and open beers and just _sigh_, in the same way that most old Japanese men do. _Ahh_, he would go (as if sitting down had exacerbated his back problems), the noise somewhere between pain and relief, and he'd sip the beer and laugh and get a little bit drunk as the new chefs-in-training sped away on their motor scooters. As the moon shimmered over the harbor, the place seemed cleaner, the ships less rusty; the tangle of seaweed, dead fish, and plastic bottles that lined the bay slipped out of mind. It was peaceful.

I'd visited Chef Takeshi about two hours ago, when Mom was still _coming in thirty minutes, no thanks to your Father_. Dad cut our week short again; said he needed to have another important business meeting with someone from America. He was dressing up in suits and ties and shaving almost every day now, leaving his tiny apartment at six in the morning and coming back drunk and exhausted after midnight. _Jaya_, he'd said one morning, _I'm sorry we don't talk anymore_. I nodded, and he pulled my blankets back up to my chin, smiled, and left.

I was sitting at Table 4, which was the unstable one; I'd crammed a couple of napkins under the foot last week but those seemed to have gone. The surface of the table was worn and covered with about three layers of chipped paint like the rest of the fish market; at least Chef kept the shop clean and cockroach-free. His small booth could only hold about ten people – right now there were a couple of businessmen drinking heavily at the bar, and me (in the corner). One of the men had just been dumped and had, in his stupor, accidentally knocked some of Chef Takeshi's photographs off the wall; all of the businessmen were trying to fix them, falling over each other with laughter. Hiroto, one of the trainees, was slumped with his feet on the table and a wet washcloth on his brow, his clothes streaked with dirt and grease from the Chef's boat.

"You're lucky, this is the last of today's catch," Chef told me, setting down my rice bowl, before approaching the businessmen with a look of amusement. Chef made rice bowls like my Dad used to, with salmon clustered around the center in a windmill shape. Dad was too busy to cook now; he only had a personal refrigerator and a microwave anyway, since his place was supposed to be _temporary_ (as he'd said over six months ago).

"My father," Chef told the businessmen as he picked up a framed picture. "He was the greatest fisherman in these parts in his day, rest his soul. He passed away at sea a few years ago during a storm, and I thought we had to close shop, since the _Tachibana_ was lost out there, too. So I just prayed and prayed and prayed, every day for a week, and on the last day, I looked out – I was with my son Hiroto over there; he can tell you – and the boat was back out there in the bay, nobody on board but the wind, and that was when I knew. He wanted me to carry on."

The businessman made to say something like _ah_, but was far too drunk and ended up shouting _WOOAH_ loudly; Chef just laughed along with his nose all scrunched up, poured himself a shot of _sake_.

"I tell you," Chef laughed, "I've never been happier to see that stupid orange boat. I always hated that color, hated my Dad while he made me sit down with him and paint our good old boat that _stupid_ color. Looks like a rubber duck, I tell you,"

The businessmen snorted with laughter, and Chef bent over and tapped another one of his pictures.

"See that there? What do you think that is? It's a full grown _enoki_ mushroom that Hiroto there found growing on the boat. No-one knows how it got there; if it came in from spores or if I spilled some _miso_ soup on deck and it came from that; only God knows. We didn't even notice until it was fist-sized."

"Could it be symbolic of something?" laughed one of the businessmen.

"Hey, hey, hey, this town's an honest town. We're not decaying. We never needed that damn ski resort to keep us going. We fish up here," Chef said as he stood up, cracking his neck.

The businessmen laughed and ordered more sake.

"Of course, of course," Chef said, and rejoined the fish market's evening chorus of yelling _Welcome, welcome. May I help you_ at any passerby. Once I finished, I left the dishes on the table with a 200-yen tip – he was far too busy to thank, and the businessmen wanted more stories about sharks and septic tanks and the time the _Tachibana_ sank at the pier overnight.

An hour later, when Mom was thirty minutes late, Chef Takeshi drove past the station in his plain white pickup truck; I doubt he could see me through the glare of the station's neon sign, cross guard and the flickering, dusty fluorescent bulbs in the ticket booth, but I waved anyway.

I walked home after another thirty minutes, Mom's lectures be damned. If she's late it's because _your father didn't tell me what's going on, and who does that man think he is, endangering his daughter like that, and making it look like it's my fault, like _he's_ the good parent here. Like I'm just this incompetent bitch_. Mom would look across our kitchen table to a man I'd never seen before and say _isn't that right_ and roll her eyes. _Teenage daughters_, she'd say, and she'd laugh and take a long drag from the cigarette they were sharing. 

* * *

I had to sneak out before Mom and her boyfriend woke up because otherwise there'd be a big scene about _Jaya, why won't you take your medication_, to which I'd reply that I didn't need it when I'm not in school and then sprint out of the house before Mom could even explain to her boyfriend what ADHD was. This particular morning, I bought some cat food at the Kiosk store, as well as a salmon onigiri and a bottle of green tea. I got held up a bit because Hiroto's junior-high kid brother was trying to buy porn with his group of baseball friends (which gave me time to count change properly, and avoid making an ass out of myself again). They all had scraped knees and elbows from sliding around in the dirt all day – I did too, but those were from falling down an embankment up on the mountain, not like I'd ever run amok with _those_ animal-chasing little shits.

The cicadas were buzzing constantly and it was about ninety degrees, so I decided to check the unshaded areas before the tea went lukewarm. The vending machines are no good nowadays, since the vending machine guy hasn't come up to service them for weeks. I'd seen him bicycling around with cardboard boxes full of beverages strapped to either side, struggling up and down the hills with sweat pouring off his brow. By my last count there's seven machines: two down in the train station, one up at the ski lift terminal, and another five scattered around the disorganized roads that snake up the hillside. This is eight, not seven – explains why I keep failing math class.

"Colin," I called, and scanned a pile of truck tires for any flash of gray kitty fur. He was one of the few cats around the mountain that trusted me, since he'd had a can stuck on his head that I'd helped him out with (which involved lots of scratching and Vaseline). The general area around the Kiosk has been converted into an impromptu junkyard – they collect all the truck tires in order of diameter and stack them along the guardrail for the drainage ditch; out by the street there are bicycles and bumpers and hubcaps, and across the street there's a bunch of old cars that won't run and boats that won't float (most of which I've unsuccessfully attempted to enter).

"Colin," I called again, but the cat wasn't hiding in any of the junk so I climbed down into the drainage ditch (keeping my sandals on, of course; I still have a scar from when I stepped on a broken beer bottle). The water was only a few centimeters deep, but it was clear and cool and it didn't look like there were any snakes around, just water skaters and cattails and whatever trash people had thrown in. The water was actually clean enough to wash clothes in (some of the older women still did), since it came fresh from the ground. I'd been up in the mountains before, rooting around for the source, but there was no river or hidden waterfall; all I got was poison ivy. Thankfully most convenience stores stock calamine lotion.

Sometimes I'd find Colin in my abandoned house down by the police station (about a few blocks downstream from the junkyard and the Kiosk), and so I figured I'd go there next. I'd actually stayed in the house on several days when Mom was being especially _Mom_; the outside is covered with a heaping mass of vines that makes it resemble a tree, but the inside is dry and the foundation seems to be holding together even if the siding and roofing are in shambles. Colin seems to like the house more than the junkyard (ever since I showed it to him), since it's currently home to several mice, and the breeze off the harbor is cool even at three blocks away.

Colin was in the house, but he was upstairs and I didn't want to risk going up myself since I'd put my foot through the floor a few months back, so I just poked at the ceiling with a stick to coax him back down.

"There we go," I crooned when he emerged. He looked like he'd been in a fight again; he was missing some more tufts of fur on his paws and he had a new nick in his left ear. I fed him the tin of cat food, and he let me pet him for a bit, but it was far too hot for him to sit on my lap. Mom would never let me take him in anyway, even when it got cold, so I'd have to find him a blanket and some sort of shelter for the winter if he was still around by then.

"Oh, do you want some fish too?" I asked, my mouth full. I've seen the folks at the fish market whacking the local strays away with brooms, so I doubt he had the guts to go down there for scraps (and even then the _dogs_ owned the place when nobody else was around).

After a while Colin stretched his back and crept through a hole in the wall out onto the street, off on another one of his adventures. I leaned back and listened to the sounds of the waves coming from the ocean and the cicadas buzzing endlessly, broken only by the brief shouts of those idiot boys running around the streets with a baseball bat. It was peaceful.

* * *

Mom was sitting alone at our kitchen table when I got back.

"Let's talk about your father," she said, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray without looking up. "It's interesting, isn't it, that he's just _always_ forgetting to call me, or forgetting to let me know about _anything_ that you're doing. Always changing his plans and 'ending the week early' without asking. What do you think, Jaya?"

"I don't know," I said.

"What, do you think I'm an idiot? A bad mother – what – are you _trying_ to make me look bad, or-"

"I don't _know_," I said.

"Don't _lie_ to me, Jaya; I'm so far beyond this right now, just tell me _what_ on Earth is going on – is it planned? Are you two setting me up with stuff like this, just to laugh at me behind my back about how much of a fucking _failure_ I am? What is it?"

"Mom, it's not-"

"What, I'm inventing this now? Don't you trust me any more – what has that man been _telling_ you about-"

"I'm not talking to you when you're like this," I said, and walked upstairs without waiting for her answer. "

"Well that's fine then", she shouted, too exhausted to follow me upstairs. "Don't bother coming down for dinner. There won't be anything."

I ran the bathroom sink until it got warm and cleaned the new scrapes I'd collected with soap. I don't even remember when these _happened_ – at least it doesn't look like I tracked poison ivy all over the house, and there's no ticks latched on anywhere I can see.

"Jaya," the convenience store clerk had said, as I leaned against the counter picking slivers of glass out of my arm, "does your mother know about everything you get yourself into?" to which I replied "No," and got to work on my leg.

"The calamine lotion's in the back," said the clerk. She was an older woman, anywhere from forty to seventy, and she'd worked there ever since the storm had hit a few years ago. Nobody actually died in town, although we did get a big landslide that knocked out a bunch of paths and shut down the old ski resort for good. They had a big construction crew come in and look at the chair lift; it was decided that it was too dangerous to even try and fix it, but it brought good business for the fish market and Chef Takeshi for a few weeks. During this time the clerk's husband, a construction worker himself, had decided that _yes, this shitty backwater mess of a town would be great for retirement_, to which the clerk ostensibly responded, _sure honey; I'll get a job at the Kiosk_. She was nice in a grandmotherly sort of way, and she knew which medicines worked the best and which sweets to give out for free along with the medicine.

I never go to the Seven-Eleven, since they've had like six clerks in the past year, all of them part-time high-schoolers that I'd rather not talk with. To adults in town I'm just that weird kid but to people from school I'm _that_ weird kid, and it's harder to stop going to school. The Seven-Eleven somehow still exists; the building's just far enough away from the Kiosk to attract all the lazy people, and both the Seven-Eleven and the Kiosk are far enough away from the fish market to justify existing at all. _That's how business works_, Dad said one day, _human laziness creates its own demand_. Dad was a software engineer. He knew.

I shut myself in my room for the rest of the evening, using a towel to block out the cigarette smoke from downstairs. I have the best room in our house so I can see down the slope of the mountain and out into the harbor. The fishing boats were filing back in, their lights dancing haphazard on the waves; the dark shapes and shadows of the dock workers, microscopic as they were at this distance, ran about busily, hoisting and roping and jumping back and forth between the boats and the land. A few pickup trucks were inching along the winding mountain roads, stopping for pedestrians and pulling into driveways and empty lots at odd angles to negotiate with the traffic.

Mom was arguing with someone on the phone; probably Dad or whoever she got to talk to Dad – she's even tried to drag my _teacher_ into these things, since Mr. Okazaki has known our family for years through special-ed. She was talking in a low tone that meant she was _serious, Paul_, which meant she was definitely talking to Dad. The phone was slammed eventually and Mom sighed, exasperated, so that she knew I could hear.

Mom showered and went to sleep eventually, so I snuck downstairs to look for food. Sometimes after she promised not to cook she would go back and leave a plate of food on the table; it would always be cold, and sometimes I didn't eat it anyway, because I didn't want to. There wasn't anything tonight. Nothing but a few spent cigarettes, the dishes she'd used left in the sink, the phone left on the counter, and the same old creak in the floorboards that had always been there as long as I remembered.

* * *

Dad was going back to America.

"You didn't tell me?" Mom said. "Are you withholding information, Jaya?"

"He didn't say one way or the other if-"

"Oh, so it just wasn't important enough to tell me? Do we need to talk-"

I left before Mom could get anything she could consider a "final word" in. Since it had rained overnight, all sorts of new fungus was probably growing everywhere, and Colin was probably wet and shivering somewhere, and the shale deposit up past the abandoned ski lodge had probably shifted, unearthing new fossils. Chef was more interested in animals that were still extant, but there are a few stalls down in the market that collect old rocks and rarities. One of them sells "legally obtained" whale ivory that they acquire from "somewhere" on a regular basis, so I generally stay away; the other one's our local _omiyage_ shop which is slowly going out of business since the ski merchandise is obsolete. Most of the model train stuff is obsolete too, since the train line got replaced with a scenic tourist route that connects all the way through to Hakodate, where Dad lives now; all that's still selling well are the local sweets.

I had breakfast down at Chef's, where Hiroto and Chef's wife were carting crates full of ice onto the _Tachibana_. The boat bobbed up and down, refreshed by the morning breeze and eager with anticipation; _hey_, she seemed to say, _make sure you check the engines_, and so Hiroto did; _And also the weather, too_, the boat would chirp, and Chef's wife would yell all the way down from the pier into the kitchen, loud enough to beat the boiling water and the alarms and Chef's Saturday-morning mecha anime.

"Looks clear!" Chef shouted back.

"What?" hollered Hiroto.

"Tell your mother it looks clear outside. Clear! Well then come closer if you can't hear me; that's what I've been saying all this time, it's clear for the rest of the day!"

"How's the soup?" Chef shouted from the kitchen. "We got some fresh clams in last night – nothing frozen in there. The _daikon_'s local too."

"Have you ever been to America?" I said back.

"America – what? No," Chef said, mopping his brow. "Can't sail there, and they don't have the same ingredients, so business would be no good. Plus I only speak Japanese. I'd look like an idiot over there."

"Do you know what it's like?"

"It's different. People are louder and they have different family values. But now, we have a new customer, so I have to get to work – welcome, welcome! Jaya, come back any time! Just leave the dishes; I'll take care of them."

I left after a few minutes, once I sorted through my bag to make sure I still had fresh calamine lotion and enough band-aids, and I guess I was sort of preoccupied since I'd failed English comprehension in school and now Dad was going to stop speaking Japanese. _Jaya_, he'd say, _it's America. With an 'r' sound, like a dog growling_. Then he'd get up close to my ear and make silly throat noises and try to tickle my armpit. _Rrr, not 'l'. 'Ra' is different from 'La' in English. Try it again – 'A – me – ri – ca'. No, not 'A – me – li – ca'; it's different_.

As I walked up the winding roads to the old train tracks, I caught myself pronouncing _A – me – ri – ca_, in tune to each footstep; _A – me – ri – ca_, over and over, out loud but under my breath, like a marching band.

* * *

"Your father wants to talk," said Mom, handing me the house phone. "He's been calling all day, while you were out."

I dug a half-empty can of cat food out of my bag and put it in the refrigerator (Colin had gotten spooked by a passing car) and washed the dirt off my hands and face. Mom was grumbling about to her boyfriend, who was splayed across the sofa in the other room with a cigarette in one hand and a football game on television, laughing about the referee and the goalie and _why didn't he just take the shot, the idiot; the goal was wide open_. I carried the phone outside under the trellis where Mom parked the car and called.

"Hey, Dad," I said.

There was muffled noise in the background, and I could hear echoed voices – probably the PA system down at the train station. "Jaya," Dad said. "I've been trying all day to-"

"Yeah, Mom said."

"So, your deadbeat Dad finally got himself a job – a big job, too. How about that?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" I said.

"Didn't think I'd actually make it, but hey – looks like I'm good for something after all. I'm at the _Shinkansen_ station right now – hoped to come up and see you before I went, but I couldn't get ahold of you. Out adventuring, I suppose. I promise I'll call often once I get there."

"Sure," I said, and I imagined him down at the train station, dressed up in the same black and white business clothes as all the people in the sea of moving faces, everyone bathed in the neon glow of the advertisements. He was exhausted – terrible at planning as always.

"You know, Jaya," said Dad. "I didn't really know how to say this to you."

"It's fine," I said.

"Once I'm in America, I'll send you packages of stuff. American food, pictures, just anything I think you'd like, really. What do you think you'd want?"

"Do you have to go?" I blurted.

"I'm sorry; I didn't- I didn't know how to say this to you. And you know I love you, and I love your mother; I _still_ love your mother. So I'm going to miss Japan too. And I'll miss you coming over every weekend and talking or not talking. This wasn't an easy decision for me, either."

"No, but do you _have_ to go?" I said.

Dad was quiet for a while, and then just said "I love you." If he was there he probably would have ruffled my hair and pinched my cheek and smiled a little.

"Your mother's got quite a handful to deal with, it looks like," he said.

"I'm fifteen now."

"Well, three five year olds are a lot to deal with." Dad laughed. "Take care of your mother. Make sure she goes to bed before her bedtime and brushes her teeth."

"Okay," I said. "But do you have to go-"

"Nobody ever _has_ to go on an adventure; they just do. That's what this all is – an adventure, you know. Now I have to get on the train, so I'm going to hang up, okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"Don't worry about me, okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"Well," said Dad, in English. "I'll talk to you later."

I sat down in the garden next to the car dad used to drive to work and looked over all the places he'd used to sit or stand or play football with me on weekends (but only _after_ I finished my homework), and then I looked inside at the stove he used to cook on, and at Mom and her boyfriend I'd decided not to meet.

I put the phone back on the counter and left before Mom could say _Jaya, I'm sorry_. She'd said that a thousand times before and it no longer mattered whether it was true.

"Jaya, it's getting late," Mom shouted after me.

I looked back at her, shrugged, turned, and walked towards the harbor.


End file.
